Stephen Downes

Tim Bray expends an awful lot of words to say that blockchain is 'a solution looking for a problem, but they're such good words, he's done the work to learn about the technology, and he places it squarely into the context of goings-on behind the scenes at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which makes it doubly interesting. "I'm not prepared to say that no blockchain-based system will ever be useful for anything," he writes. "But I'm gonna stay negative until I see one actually at work doing something useful, without number-go-up greedheads clamped on its teats.And I'm glad AWS didn't make a big bet on it back then."